The study, which Shay conducted with colleagues at the University of Florida and University of Nebraska, complements work with mice he leads at his OSU laboratory. In one 2013 trial, he and his graduate students supplemented the diets of overweight mice with extracts from Pinot noir grapes harvested from Corvallis-area vineyards.
Some of the mice were fed a normal diet of "mouse chow," as Shay calls it, containing 10 percent fat. The rest were fed a diet of 60 percent fat -- the sort of unhealthy diet that would pile excess pounds on a human frame.
"Our mice like that high-fat diet," said Shay, "and they overconsume it. So they're a good model for the sedentary person who eats too much snack food and doesn't get enough exercise."
The grape extracts, scaled down to a mouse's nutritional needs, were about the equivalent of one and a half cups of grapes a day for a person. "The portions are reasonable," said Shay, "which makes our results more applicable to the human diet."
"If we could develop a dietary strategy for reducing the harmful accumulation of fat in the liver, using common foods like grapes," Shay said, "that would be good news.